Big projects in Africa--real big, like dams, football stadiums and bridges--built by Chinese companies with ties to the government of China generallyBig projects in Africa--real big, like dams, football stadiums and bridges--built by Chinese companies with ties to the government of China generally get the headlines and set the tone for the narrative of China in Africa. Howard French has spent years in both China and Africa, speaks French, English and Mandarin and thinks that the a different truth about the Chinese agenda and the African response to it are created by the thoughts, deeds and attitudes of thousands of individuals, most of them anonymous. French is a clear, thoughtful storyteller. He has talked with Chinese managers, technicians, construction workers and even a few owners of karaoke bars and illegal roadside peddlers along with hundreds of African miners, merchants and farmers plus more than a few diplomats. It is tempting to say that he lets his interlocutors tell the story themselves but it only seems that way—French has shaped years of work into a book that is both full of information and a joy to read.

His chapter on Zambian copper miners and Chinese supervisors is a good example. We know that the ill treatment and lack of respect by Chinese managers of their Zambian workers, including beating them when they asked for back wages, led to a series of confrontation that resulted in a Chinese foreman being killed and twelve Zambians shot and wounded but not killed. This incident happened after French finished his reporting but he made it seem as inevitable as a Greek tragedy that there would be deadly conflict. A shocking but not surprising statement from the president, Rupiah Banda, made it clear whose side the government was on: “Every day people are shot by Zambians, are shot by white people, are shot by Americans, they are shot by everyone. Let’s be careful that we do not single out people”. Makes it seem that Zambia has as much gun violence as, say, the United States.

Senegal is another case—The Senegalese are some of the most vigorous and energetic merchants in Africa and are ubiquitous on street corners from New York to Milan selling clothing made with “authentic” West African cloth (now usually made from start to finish in textile factories in China). However Chinese merchants selling pirated DVD, mobile phone airtime, cigarettes, essentially anything portable and cheap started colonizing the trading streets and souks of Dakar, outselling the Senegalese on their home turf by undercutting prices and working more aggressively.

French found Chinese people everywhere—from boardrooms to ramshackle offices at the mouth of copper pits to shacks selling trinkets in cities. Clearly they have inserted themselves into African economies (but not societies) from top to bottom.

Swiss journalists Serge Michel and Michel Beuret spent a couple of years touring much of Africa talking with Chinese construction workers, merchants aSwiss journalists Serge Michel and Michel Beuret spent a couple of years touring much of Africa talking with Chinese construction workers, merchants and miners where they could find them--which was just about everywhere--and getting a ground level view of how the People's Republic of China is investing in and buying up resources, hiring African workers and setting up companies. They combined hundreds of interviews, uncounted hours of observation and a raft of secondary sources in creating China Safari, a book that is as much about life under African “big men” as it is about China’s intervention.

The Chinese are building infrastructure that could help unify the continent; the roads, pipelines, ports and airports that they construct could be the basis for tying together currently disparate and often hostile African nations. A major advantage they have is that successful businesses run by Africans risk being looted or taken over by political elites while Chinese businesses are a much tougher target. The Chinese approach differs from banks in the U.S and western Europe in that they have no interest in the imprimatur of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund—they don’t insist on democratic elections (usually just window dressing to qualify for loans) or progress on human rights for their citizens.

Michel and Beuret found that Chinese in Africa have the same prejudices and racist assumptions as the former colonial masters, that Africans are “naturally” lazy compared with their ambitious, hardworking countrymen. In China, they claim, if farmers don’t plant rice in the spring they will starve in the autumn while in Sub-Sahara Africa “you can just pick fruit from the trees all around you.”

The social, economic and political outcomes of China’s move into Africa continue to evolve. Zambian copper miners working for a Chinese company were fired upon by managers during labor unrest, but Zambian government and police the mine operators against the striking workers. In Angola low interest loans from the Ex-Im Bank of China and the China International Fund are spent on infrastructure with most of the work being done by workers from China which excludes Angolan workers from experience in construction work and management. The loans (over ten billion dollars over a few years) are repaid in oil.

No one but the Chinese would have built communication and electric power networks in southern and central Africa. While China is there in pursuit of its own interests, they have offered their African hosts a vision of the future that was inconceivable in the colonial and post-colonial past. ...more

Thinking about peacebuilding, the subject of “Peaceland”, Séverine Autesserre’s new book, makes it hard to imagine that such an endeavor could ever woThinking about peacebuilding, the subject of “Peaceland”, Séverine Autesserre’s new book, makes it hard to imagine that such an endeavor could ever work well enough to be critiqued. There are the operational difficulties inherent in coordinating varied participants, some of whom had been recently trying to kill others in the group, conflicting goals among local stakeholders, pressure from outside sources pursuing their own agendas and the presence of not quite disarmed or demobilized groups on the fringe of the action. Tribal, ethnic, linguistic and religious antagonism among groups of people combined with competition for resources and histories of domination of one group over another seems to make long-term or even limited peace impossible.

But dedicated people still set out from the United Nations, the International Rescue Committee, Catholic Relief Service and myriad other organizations in order to help countries recover after they have experienced mass slaughter, marauding armies, mob violence and the atrocities that accompany internecine warfare.

Séverine Autesserre defines peacebuilding “to include any and all elements identified by local and international stakeholders as attempts to create, strengthen, and solidify peace...thus encompasses the various elements of the security, socioeconomic and political dimensions that scholars study.” This includes work from immediate post-conflict situations where peacebuilders work alongside peacekeepers to demobilize combatants and help them reintegrate into society by preventing the resumption of violence through reconciliation of the warring parties and reconstruction of the material basis of the community.

So they are faced with a difficult task to begin with. Autesserre asks why peacebuilders aren’t more successful more often. She took an ethnographic approach, immersing herself in the activities of a community of interveners in the eastern Congo for over a year, drawing on her history as an intervener and researcher in the Kivus where a number of locals and expats knew her or her work. She was able to build relationships of trust over time to get beyond the party lines created for outsiders—the press, donors, drop-in researchers—and find out what the peace workers personal opinions were. She accompanied them on patrols, shadowed them in their daily work, participated in missions and spent days and nights in base camps and compounds—research like this is not for the faint of heart. This was supplemented by comparative research in eight other conflict zones to refine and extend her work in the Congo.

She found that the daily practice of peacebuilding—what happened on the ground where, with the best of intentions, years of training and experience, expats continue to carry out programs that haven’t worked in the past and continue to fail. One telling example involves security routines and risk management. “Bunkerization” with fortified compounds, guards, tight restrictions on movement outside the compounds, essentially a military view of security, has become the norm in most missions. This leads to further isolation from the local population, lessens opportunities for communication and creates resentment among those they are trying to help. And it creates an unnecessary climate of fear among those deployed. Autesserre, in a great example of using her own experience in the field as part of her research, writes that interveners were more fearful than business travelers and scholarly researchers in the same area. “My husband, several other contacts, and I noticed that when we were attached to an intervening organization in a conflict zone we felt much more scared than when we worked in the same area for other reasons.”

This is just one of about a zillion examples that Autesserre uses to show that the political assumptions, career concerns and organizational bureaucratic demands of interveners have a significant, perhaps telling, effect on the success of peacebuilding missions. She is an indefatigable researcher, pounding home her points with lessons learned in the field so that her conclusions are reliable. She writes well—while “Peaceland” is an academic work anyone interested in how nations that have been to hell and not quite all the way back can stitch themselves back together and avoid the scourge of civil war and communal strife in the future. ...more

Patrice Lumumba was a charismatic, commanding man with a revolutionary aura about him, cut down before he was able to exercise power long enough for aPatrice Lumumba was a charismatic, commanding man with a revolutionary aura about him, cut down before he was able to exercise power long enough for anybody to be sure how he would have reshaped the world but those who knew him (and especially those who feared him) had no doubt he was a world-historical figure.

An example of this was during the ceremonial hand-off of power from the Belgian colonial power to the newly independent Congo. Lumumba, the first elected Prime Minister of the Republic of the Congo, wasn't scheduled to speak but after hearing the Belgian king say that "The independence of the Congo is the result of the undertaking conceived by the genius of King Leopold II," he rose and declared:

"During the 80 years of colonial rule, we suffered so much that we cannot remove the scars of the memory. We were forced into slave labor for wages that do not even allow us to eat enough to ward off hunger, or to find housing, or raise our children and loved ones who are ..."We have suffered ironies, insults and beatings just because we are black ... Who can forget the massacres of many of our brothers, or the cells in which they have put those who do not submit to oppression and exploitation? Brothers, this is the way our life has been."

Already considered dangerous, Lumumba shook the foundations of the post-colonial world and would have to be dealt with. De Witte is preoccupied with the Belgian role in Lumumba’s fall and death; his book is an indictment of what he considers an unholy alliance led by the Belgian government acting through well-paid Congolese stooges and enjoying the connivance of the American Central Intelligence Agency and the United Nations.

"The Assassination of Lumumba" sparked a parliamentary inquiry in Brussels which concluded that Belgium bears a "moral responsibility" responsibility for the assassination. It is not easy reading--De Witte spares few details in describing the torture, murder and corpse desecration that took place--but has a real ring of truth. ...more

Otherwise intelligent commentators on the economics of development are at a loss when dealing with the problems of sub-Sahara Africa. William EasterlyOtherwise intelligent commentators on the economics of development are at a loss when dealing with the problems of sub-Sahara Africa. William Easterly, professor of economics at NYU, Co-Director of NYU’s Development Research Institute and constant thorn in the side of the egregious Jeffrey Sachs seems to miss the point when he writes that the power of democracy and free markets, implemented by "homegrown political, economic, and social reformers and entrepreneurs" (in other words a new and as yet non-existent generation of local elites) as if this can be accomplished by the debt ravaged nations of the poorest continent.

Léonce Ndikumana and James Boyce point to one of the most intractable problems faced by African countries, "odious debt", defined as debts incurred without the consent of the people, used for private benefit rather than public good and issued by creditors who were either aware, or should have been aware, of the lack of consent and benefit of such loans. One could also add (at least I would) that the lenders of such debt, whether transnational organizations like the IMF, international financial institutions like the World Bank or the African Development Bank or the money center banks with headquarters in New York, London or Paris and with world-wide reach were also aware that the chances for actual repayment of interest and principal on many of these loans was negligible.

For example, more than half of the money borrowed by African governments in recent decades departed in the same year, with a significant portion of it winding up in private accounts at the very banks that provided the loans in the first place. Perhaps the best (worst) example of this and certainly the most flamboyant was the Congo where Mobutu Sese Seko, kleptocrat in chief, rerouted at least five billion dollars in development aid to Zaire/DRC into accounts for himself and his family in European and American banks. International banks know everything about the theft and capital flight from sub-Saharan Africa since much of the loans that the banks make or facilitate to African nations comes back to the banks as deposits by “high net worth” individuals.

The combination of sheer incompetence, delusion, corruption, and regulatory failure that allowed American banks to push the world economy to the edge of collapse was exactly why those same banks continue to lend money to the region, even though it would obviously never be repaid.

The authors have plenty of recommendations for dealing with the hemorrhage of capital from sub-Saharan Africa. They include cleaning up the balance sheets of the banks to reclassify these loans so they are not carried as assets, making real efforts to stop money laundering; billions of francs flowing from the DRC to Paris banks left a digital paper trail, for example, and current capital flight continues to do so. It is a target rich environment.

Most importantly though, Ndikumana and Boyce say that odious debts should be selectively repudiated as illegal under international law and the laws of creditor countries. This would not be a wholesale, unilateral cancellation of external debt but a selective use of the hammer of debt repudiation against the worst of the loans that fund capital flight from the debtor nations and do nothing to benefit the citizens of those nations. ...more

Kevin Dunn makes the point that in order to understand dreadful history of war, internal armed violence and destruction of both the environment and thKevin Dunn makes the point that in order to understand dreadful history of war, internal armed violence and destruction of both the environment and the social order that has characterized the Congo/Zaire/DRC for the past century, one must examine how the Congo has been imagined: how it has been defined, who has defined it and for whose benefit.

While it is commonplace wisdom that history is written by the winners it is also influenced by the dominant narrative during the time that history happens. If the Congolese are cannibals, savages or children in a state of nature needing the Belgians to bring them civilization, salvation and capitalism we have one way of looking at the 80 years of Belgian rule. If the men from Brussels are serf herding racists who see Africans as just another resource to be exploited, not quite human and worth less than the rubber they harvest, there is another quite different view of things.

Since independence, if the Congo/Zaire/DRC is considered an economic and cultural wasteland run by kleptocratic dictators who are accepted or simply endured by a quiescent population, one will think differently of it than if the period since 1960 is seen as a continuation of colonial attitudes and policies with an overlay during the Cold War of great power politics which propped up sticky-fingered louts like Mobutu Sese Seko.

Here is a telling example of how competing imperialist forces used similar images to describe the Congo and its people: under Leopold II, whose representatives ruled with lash and gun, the Congolese were said to be barbarians lacking the civilizing touch of the Enlightenment and as hapless victims who needed rescuing from evil Arab slave traders. The reform movement portrayed them still as savages and also as victims but of Leopold’s greed and cruelty. The reformers managed only to change the Congo Free State into the Belgian Congo, turning it from the personal possession of the king into a colony of Belgium but the Africans were still considered to be barely human. As it happens with a few exceptions like committed human rights campaigners Roger Casement and Edmund Morel the Congo reform movement was only interested in insuring the free trade rights with the Congo and not with the well-being of its inhabitants.

Perceptions didn’t change much during the next 70 years or so. In 1955 a Belgian academic wrote that “the great mass of the Congo’s inhabitants are incapable of governing themselves. This will be so for a long time to come...” while a survey of Belgians found that many of them expressed the views that the Congolese were savages newly introduced to civilization.

The differences were most clear at the independence ceremonies for the colony in 1960. King Baudouin’s speech repeated that the colonists were in Africa to open up backwards countries to European civilization; he looked back to 80 years of bringing civilization and salvation to the people of the Congo River basin. Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the newly independent Congo said that “our lot was eighty years of colonial rule; are wounds are still too fresh to be driven from our memory.” He spoke of Congolese being beaten, thrown into prison, killed and banished; of horrendous living conditions, different laws for whites and Congolese and the contempt with which Congolese were addressed by Belgians, with “familiar verb forms not indeed as with a friend but because the honorable formal verb forms were reserved for whites.”

The essence of colonialism, according to a text by John and Jean Comaroff quoted by Dunn, is “less in political overrule than in seizing and transforming 'others' by interacting with them on terms not of their own choosing; in making them the pliant objects and silenced subjects of our scenarios; in assuming the capacity to represent them.” This is particularly important in Dunn’s analysis since he draws on the Edward Said’s reading of “The Prison Notebooks” by Antonio Gramsci. One of the key concepts that Said takes from Gramsci is that subjects are the product of historical processes that seem not to leave traces—that are considered natural and normal. Gramsci argues that the first step in critical inquiry of colonial people is to make an inventory of those traces to counter the ability of the dominant class or nation to project its own way of seeing the world so that those who are subordinated by it accept it as inevitable and the way things should be.

Patrice Lumumba interpreted the colonial period as one of exploitation, repression and resource extraction. Since he opposed the colonial narrative in every way he was seen as particularly radical, unstable and dangerous. He was demonized, isolated and murdered—it would be an intriguing counterfactual history to look at the history of the Congo if Lumumba had been allowed to continue as Prime Minister. ...more

While the European colonization of Africa is one of the lowest points of so-called Western civilization (or Western so-called civilization) the historWhile the European colonization of Africa is one of the lowest points of so-called Western civilization (or Western so-called civilization) the history of the Congo is horrific even by the standards of primitive accumulation set by the British and French empire builders who realized that a partially educated native population serving as clerks, middle managers (supervising only other Africans, of course) and non-commissioned officers in the military was necessary to channel the aspirations of the indigenous people into activities useful to the metropolis and not threatening to the dominant polity. There were plenty of atrocities committed under the Union Jack (Kenya) and the Tricolor (Algeria) but there was also an attempt to leave behind a functioning state capable of self-government, if only to continue the exploitation of former colonies.

It was different in the Congo. The Belgians excluded Africans from higher education, government and corporate management and the learned professions. When the men from Brussels got on the last planes north they left behind an economic, social and political disaster. The numbers show a shameful century of rule by the lash, the iron fist in the mailed glove: there were 16 university graduates and 136 high school graduates in a population of about 14 million; there were no Congolese teachers, physicians or army officers and only one native lawyer. The population itself was about ten million people less than if the Belgians hadn’t arrived, due to war, starvation and disease according to contemporary report.

So the citizens of the Congo/Zaire/DRC never had a chance. They have been reaping the whirlwind sowed by their colonial overseers for the past five decades, particularly during the almost constant warfare from 1996 to 2004. “The Congo Wars: Conflict, Myth and Reality” by Thomas Turner is one of many attempts to analyze the Great African War, its causes, combatants and outcomes.

Turner sees a nexus of events as “convergent catastrophes” beginning with the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the flight of one million (or so) Hutus into Kivu province of the DRC after the Paul Kagame led Rwandan Patriotic Front intervened and the collapse of the Zairian/Congolese state which allowed the Interahamwe militia hidden in the refugee camps to attack Rwanda and the Rwandan Patriotic Front to retaliate. It was armed conflict characterized by mass murder and rape of civilians, systematic looting and the use of refugees as both shields and cover for contending armies.

Turner shows how the refugee camps in the DRC, hard by its borders with Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, were used as recruitment grounds and staging areas for the armed rabble used as pawn in cross border battles and as a rationale for both Uganda and Rwanda to attack the DRC. Refugees were forced across the continent through and forest, dying or being killed along the way.

The international response was to do nothing. Whatever the reasons given by those with the power to intervene to stop the crimes against humanity, it seems clear that the lives of Africans didn’t weigh that heavily on the conscience of those in Washington, Paris or Brussels. MONUC, the UN mission to the eastern Congo was underfunded and poorly led, with an unclear instructions and no real mandate to intervene into the murderous activity around them.

There is more—lots more—in this short book including a detailed, compact history of the economic, cultural and linguistic history of the Banyamulenga people in Rwanda and the Kivus. They were part of the forced labor migration from population dense but resource poor Rwanda to the mines and fields of what was then the Congo Free State. In the citizenship/nationality debates decades later Belgian administrative decisions—who would be sent where to do what kind of labor—were recast as agreement between Africans, creating unanswerable questions and long standing sources of conflict regarding the rights of people who settled in the Congo at different times.

The doleful history of the Congo has to be told (and learned) from many points of view. Historians, political scientists, NGO aid workers and peacekeepers look at issues differently from each other and from the Congolese civil society and political actors who live through them. Turner’s book is a good account of the basis for much of it. If you disagree with (or simply don’t like) Marxist terminology: class, lumpenized masses, urban proletariat—you may have some trouble here since Turner uses these concepts of social organization as an important part of his analysis. He is by no means a Marxist but uses all the intellectual tools available and appropriate. ...more

I come not to praise Paul Collier and not really to bury him but to point out what I feel are some flaws in this very highly praised book. First of alI come not to praise Paul Collier and not really to bury him but to point out what I feel are some flaws in this very highly praised book. First of all it is too "popular" by half. He leaves out all of the research that went into his book; he describes some of the difficulties he and his indefatigable band of international Ph.D. candidates had in finding data and in constructing experiments that worked and then has a list of the original research he used. More method and less description of outcomes would have made his conclusions more credible. The way the book is structured is an irresistible march from the chaotic political world of sub-Saharan Africa to development, democracy and peace made possible by national leaders agreeing to limit their sovereignty in favor of international guarantees enforced by "over the horizon" commitments for armed intervention by the United States and the former colonial powers.

His point on how elections in the poorest and most violence prone nations actually work against democracy and majority rule is excellent. In "The Trouble With Congo", Séverine Autesserre shows how and why elections demanded by the donor community in the DRC were a disaster--both the campaigns and the outcome led to more murderous violence by armed gangs supporting a warlord disguised temporarily as a candidate.

Collier's prescription for ending conflict in post-conflict societies, keeping coups from following coups and allowing development to take place in a (more) peaceful environment, giving up the rights and privileges of statehood, will not happen. In "Africa: Unity, Sovereignty, and Sorrow", Pierre Englebert shows how state sovereignty in Africa is a good in itself and it is based on the boundaries drawn by the former colonial masters. While there are coups and even occasional civil wars, there have been with few exceptions (Eritria, South Sudan, East Timor in Indonesia) no movements for independence from an existing state among Collier's bottom billion, even when there are very real ethnic, tribal or geographic inequities. Everyone wants to take over the state--no one wants to form a new one.

It would be easy to condemn Collier as a neo-colonialist but that is too simple and ignores his real commitment to the poorest of the world. His conclusions would work in a world where rational people follow rational courses of action not in the messy, bloody and fearsome world we live in. ...more

Having spent much time and energy over the years organizing support for various progressive causes (some successful, some much less so) I am intriguedHaving spent much time and energy over the years organizing support for various progressive causes (some successful, some much less so) I am intrigued with Rebecca Hamilton’s experience and her analysis of it in "Fighting for Darfur".

Regarding her use of the term "genocide", naming is essential to disseminating one’s views about something. If one gets there first and is able to create or control the name it can be very powerful. For example, if one calls the conflict in Darfur genocide inflicted by the regime in Khartoum then not opposing Khartoum makes one implicit in genocide. Organized, large scale slaughter of civilians, while horrifying and immoral, may not call for military intervention that could result in more death and greater destruction. Genocide will always come under the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) so what we call it is important.

Years ago we used a lot of loaded terms, almost always inaccurately–fascism was the genocide of the day–and in doing so weakened the authority we had developed through organizing. Hamilton is an indefatigable advocate and a good organizer but the "Save Darfur" movement showed how limited first world political organizing can be in trying to deal with Third/Developing world issues. ...more

Gareth Evans makes a gallant and sometimes successful effort in trying to convince his readers that mass atrocities, genocide or ethnic cleansing canGareth Evans makes a gallant and sometimes successful effort in trying to convince his readers that mass atrocities, genocide or ethnic cleansing can be stopped by intervention into and against the countries where they are happening or about to happen. While I disagree with many of his conclusions there is no question that he is sincere in thinking that crimes against humanity can be stopped or kept from starting and his commitment to bringing the story to the world must be applauded. He has long experience: foreign minister of Australia, high level UN official, CEO of the International Crisis Group. Evans thinks the nations of the world can act in concert when faced with mass slaughter and that they have already created the framework to do so, lacking only the political will and ability to see beyond their own narrow interests.

His--and everyone’s--example is the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the unfortunate signature event in the history of humanitarian crises since the end of World War II. Every nation and international body that didn’t intervene had their reasons although none of the reasons stand up against the fact of the massacre of 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu men, women and children during a three month rampage of blood lust. The United Nations had international troops already on the scene—and they were reporting to Kofi Annan, later Secretary General, at that time in charge of peacekeeping operations. The United States abdicated its role at the world’s sole superpower—the memory of the disastrous mission to Somalia was too fresh in the minds of Bill Clinton and his advisors. Belgium, the former colonial power, turned its back on Rwanda.

Evans’s premise is that such horrors can be halted before they start by a combination of political, legal, economic and diplomatic pressure and that military intervention would only be necessary if they fail. It involves international action before the killing starts in order to minimize horrors of mass atrocity and to keep military incursion as a last and rarely used resort. Again Rwanda is the example; only the ferocity and efficiency of the killing took anyone by surprise.

The difficulties in establishing a true responsibility to protect citizens of a country not one’s own are significant—I would argue they are overwhelming—and Evans doesn’t try to diminish them. The first issue is state sovereignty. Evans thinks a system of limited sovereignty would be acceptable in the case of mass atrocity although there is little to support this idea, particularly when sovereignty and independence are among the only attributes that a state engaged in ethnic cleansing has. He thinks that the political leadership of countries in a position to intervene will do so even though they have refused in almost every case. Charges of neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism carry a great deal of weight when made by former colonies in Africa and Asia and have been effective in delaying initiatives particularly by their former colonial masters.

Evans writes well—he can even make the history of changes in UN resolutions sound interesting (or at least not dull)—and makes his arguments with every bit of moral and political persuasion he can muster which is quite a lot. But I disagree that the world has changed fundamentally in the past 25 years, that political leaders with myriad constituencies have become more altruistic and that we have decided to become our brother’s keeper.

Many of the principals of the responsibility to protect (R2P in jargon) seem derived from the Roman philosophical doctrine of jus ad bellum or just war. A key part of Catholic social teachings for centuries, the idea of just war has been accepted by most states and is ignored by just as many when it comes time to apply it.

This is an impassioned and well-presented book that ultimately fails to convince. ...more

This is one of the many excellent books in English that have been published in the recent past on the Congo, its wars and its neighbors. Rene LemarchaThis is one of the many excellent books in English that have been published in the recent past on the Congo, its wars and its neighbors. Rene Lemarchand has studied the history, economy and politics of Rwanda, Burundi and the Congo (Zaire, the DRC) and analyzes the doleful wars, mass killings, systematic looting and general collapse that have characterized these states. I think that his most important addition to the discussion is in discrediting two of the dominant myths that have stymied well-meaning attempts at real reform.

The first involves the 1994 Rwandan genocide. He never downplays the horror of the massacres and the immorality and guilt of those covered with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis but Lemarchand shows how it was a part of a continuum of slaughter involving Tutsis, Hutus and Congolese from all three countries and that comparisons to the systematic killing of Jews by the Nazis (a popular metaphor) are specious at best. For years the leaders of Rwanda have branded anyone who dissents from the accepted accounts 1994 as, if not genocidaires themselves then apologists for the machete wielding mobs. Paul Kagame has used the shock and revulsion of the Rwandan genocide and the guilt of the UN, France, Belgium and other western powers for not raising a finger to stop it.

Lemarchand rejects the “good Tutsi victims” versus “bad Hutu killers” formulation since it ignores the 1972 slaughter of Hutu in Burundi, the massacre of Hutu refugees in eastern Congo, or the systematic elimination of Hutu civilians during and after the 1990 invasion of Rwanda by Kagame’s soldiers. Reducing everything to a slogan means never having to deal with a complex set of circumstances.

A more recent myth is that the continuing warfare in what is called a “post-conflict situation” is due to the demand by western companies for cheap minerals from the Congo. These companies and their African puppets, according to the received telling of events, are both the initial motive and the reason for continuing large scale violence. Lemarchand shows that it is social and economic exclusion of millions of people based on ethnicity, tribal origins or language that was the real impetus for organized carnage. The inability of the vast majority of the citizens of the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi to effect or even influence the political decisions that exclude them from any sense of control of their lives creates a good atmosphere for recruitment for the irregular militias that plague the African Great Lakes region. Those in power and the donor nations that allow them to continue in power haven’t and won’t change things.

“The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa” isn’t an easy book—not that it is obscure, poorly written or full of undefined technical terms but because of the brutal story it tells of the horrors of constant warfare with no end in sight.

It should be on the bookshelf of anyone interested in the recent history of the Great Lakes region. ...more

Without realizing it I have been looking for this book for several years, since first running across the "Foreign Policy" Failed States Index. That thWithout realizing it I have been looking for this book for several years, since first running across the "Foreign Policy" Failed States Index. That the countries on the list, particularly those toward the bottom, were dangerous, unpleasant places was obvious but I found it hard to grasp the concept of a failed state. It was an existential dilemma; if a country was a complete failure how could it continue to exist as a country. If it didn't have a monopoly on armed violence, wasn't able to enforce its laws, suffered from extreme political corruption along with a shattered social and political structure was it still a state and if so how could if continue in such a shadowy, perilous existence. What keeps Somalia or the Democratic Republic of the Congo from splintering along tribal, ethnic or geographical lines and who could possibly benefit from such states continuing to limp along, something more than just an area on a map but less than a minimally functioning nation?

Englebert's book is a masterful answer to those questions. He doesn't look at why states fail nor at their rulers but concentrates on those who could have power but don't try to exercise it in what seems to be the most obvious way--secession. While there are rebellions that seek state power--essentially fighting for control of an empty hulk--civil wars leading to new state formation are very rare. Eritrea gaining independence from Ethiopia is the only successful one although South Sudan may become the second based on a referendum scheduled for early next year. One difficulty faced by separatists is that state legitimacy is founded on post-colonialism. The founders and their founding narratives are inseparable from the colonial past and the sacrifices of nationalist freedom fighters against it. An unbroken history of statehood from the time the Union Jack or French Tricolor was hauled down for the last time until the present is the foundation of political authority in much of Africa. Political institutions derive their power from their status in former colonial entities and, perhaps most importantly, African sovereignty is a product of recognition by supranational bodies like the United Nations and the African Union, and of international law and diplomacy rather than domestic nation building.

The most obvious question is cui bono--who benefits from living in, trying to administer or pretending to rule a failed state? Englebert does a great job here. Those in the political/military leadership have most to gain; essentially they have free rein over the flow of aid from other nations and from nongovernment organizations (NGOs) allowing them to enrich themselves and to secure the loyalty of officials dependent on them. The leaders have legal command which they can share with subordinates, providing them with the public office and the trappings of sovereignty allowing the lower level satraps to appropriate wealth from the population through the "right" to collect bribes and levy arbitrary taxes. This filters down to the lower levels of officialdom: court clerks, police officers, custom officials and others who are able to extract resources from those who need their services. There are many instances of provincial and local officials who haven't been paid or even acknowledged by the central state--Englebert particularly mentions the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo--hanging on to those offices because the legal command they bring allows them the enrich or simply support themselves at the expense of those farther down the pecking order.

So if the failed state is able to continue its legal and sovereign existence based on international recognition and can maintain control over part of its territory though the devolution of this recognition how can it be addressed? Englebert has some radical but possibly effective ideas: selective recognition of states based on good governance and effective institution building after first limiting the supply of sovereignty through derecognition forcing the states to seek domestic legitimacy. An African example is Somaliland, the northern province of Somalia; it has separated itself from the central government although without the benefit of independent diplomatic existence. Yet Somaliland has better governance than most post-colonial states in Africa.

This is an extraordinary book by a scholar who has immersed himself in the sources and worked in the field for years. While aimed at academics and experts in Africa, it is a well written and accessible work for the interested non-specialist as well. ...more

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is a huge country--the third largest by area in Africa--with almost unimaginable mineral wealth, a intelligThe Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is a huge country--the third largest by area in Africa--with almost unimaginable mineral wealth, a intelligent and hard working population and productive farmland with several growing seasons per year. Mobutu Sese Seko ruled the DRC/Zaire for 32 years in a brutal kleptocracy which kept the Congo an impoverished giant. While there had been revolts against his rule over the years it was not until the mid-1990s, following the genocide in neighboring Rwanda that warfare became a permanent part of the DRC. Since 1997 the United Nations has had its largest and most expensive peacekeeping deployment in the eastern Congo. There have been well funded and well meaning attempts at nation building. Warfare continues almost unabated. Refugees and internally displaced people stuck in huge camps unable or afraid to return to their homelands number in the millions. Clearly things aren't working and "The Trouble with the Congo" goes a long way in telling why.

Severine Autesserre's insights are amazing, particularly her discussion of how the peacebuilding community almost universally considered people in the Eastern DRC to be savages who are inherently murderous. This, by the way, is not a white or even western view of the Congolese. South Africans and many from neighboring countries felt that extensive and constant violence was the norm in the Congo. Another is how UN representatives convinced themselves that pitched battles between large groups of armed men in an area covered by a truce was still part of a post-conflict world and not even a violation of the truce.

The most striking aspect of the book is her low key scholarly approach--although I realize that is both necessary and appropriate in academic work, I keep expecting to get to the section where she starts ripping into those people who were so responsible for "The Trouble with the Congo".

Autesserre's very temperate perhaps even restrained presentation makes her conclusions all the more powerful. And her immersion in and mastery of the sources--it seems she has read everything and interviewed everyone--means her method is rock solid, or so it seems to this non-academic. Spending a couple of years in North and South Kivu, sometimes as a humanitarian worker--her first trip to the area was for the Spanish chapter of Doctors without Borders--and sometimes as a researcher has given her access to the depth and breadth of contacts necessary to understand the situation on the ground. She established her intellectual framework through deep reading of both theoretical and journalistic accounts of how the peacebuilding process has failed and succeeded in Africa and elsewhere.

The solutions toward which her work point at first seem so obvious as to not need saying: a combination of a top down approach that deals with national and regional issues combined with a bottom up approach that deals with local issues would work much better than doing only one or the other. But because that integrated plan of attack hasn't been tried in the Eastern Congo the war that is officially not a war continues.

Autesserre's prose is both rigorous and technical enough so that the reader knows exactly what she means but also clear and accessible to the non-specialist--like me. I just beginning to learn a bit about the Congo and the African Great Lakes region and "The Trouble with the Congo" has been invaluable. I figure that reading about 20 books on such a huge subject will be a good start and I only with they could all be as good as this one....more

This book has taken on a "ripped from the headlines" timeliness since the very recent leak of a UN investigation into the war in the Congo between 199This book has taken on a "ripped from the headlines" timeliness since the very recent leak of a UN investigation into the war in the Congo between 1996 and 1998 which concluded that the Rwandan military was guilty of war crimes and possible genocide against Hutu refugees. Since the genocide perpetrated by the Hutu against the Tutsi people in Rwanda in 1994 Paul Kagame has used the pusillanimous behavior of the UN, the United States and Western Europe to demand that they support Rwanda economically and turn a blind eye to the way they treat ethnic minorities.

Gerald Prunier says that Kagame has used his "genocide guilt credit" to force the West to allow him a free hand in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, particularly in the mineral rich North and South Kivu provinces. Prunier, a well thought of analyst of Central and East Africa who has spent years studying the area, lays much of the blame for the continuing murderous conflict in the DRC on Kagame with Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, grasping kleptocrat Sese Seko Mobutu, the foreign office of France and many others also condemned as part of the problem.

Much of the war was about looting of the Congo for personal gain and to fund the war itself. Prunier says that sending his troops into the Congo was one way that Museveni kept from having to pay them while the Rwandan ministry of defense had a "Congo Desk" to make sure the proper cut of the loot went to the top. Uganda was most transparent in their theft, declaring gold and diamonds taken from the Congo and then sold as official export income. Rwanda had large increases in diamond exports with no additional domestic production to account for it.

According to Prunier there were no real good guys--just about everyone involved in the Congo Wars was a scoundrel, some worse than others. The war wasn't a civil war as such--for example one battle in December of 2000 for control of Lubumbashi in Katanga the "rebel" forces were made up of regular army forces of Rwanda and Uganda plus the irregular armed bands they supported while the "DRC" army opposing them was largely troops from Angola, Zambia and Namibia. Some were there for loot; some to settle long standing grievances against the DRC; some for both. But none of the combatants--which at one point also included soldiers from Chad airlifted by the Libyan air force and troops from Sudan operating on DRC territory against Ugandan irregulars--were interested in the a peaceful solution of the Congo War. This was ethnic, political and economic warfare carried out with constant savagery against civilian populations and refugees, the slaughter of women and children with almost unparalleled brutality.

Prunier is an elegant writer. He makes his case very well even if his biases occasionally show through. There are some documentation lapses--some important references are to private conversations with unnamed officials--but with 99 pages of footnotes, largely in English and French, he has obviously read very deeply into his subject. This occasionally leads to overly detailed discussions--for example if one wants to know about the four different Hutu political factions in Burundi in 1995, each with its own militia, how and why each group split, its internal politics and its relationship with the Burundian army you will find it here.

Whatever its minor faults, though, "Africa's World War" is an extraordinary and necessary reexamination of the past decade of African history. ...more

This book has been reviewed everywhere by everyone, almost always positively and I have little to add to the encomiums that accompany it.

"King LeopolThis book has been reviewed everywhere by everyone, almost always positively and I have little to add to the encomiums that accompany it.

"King Leopold's Ghost" is not only a good place for someone who knows little about sub-Sahara Africa to start, it is often cited in academic texts, validation of its method and conclusions by a very meticulous group. ...more

Jason Stearns set a formidable task for himself in the Introduction to his excellent “Dancing in the Glory of Monsters”, taking Hannah Arendt memorablJason Stearns set a formidable task for himself in the Introduction to his excellent “Dancing in the Glory of Monsters”, taking Hannah Arendt memorable “the banality of evil” as the starting point for his investigation into the decades long war in the Congo. He doesn’t personalize the murderous violence and the evil behind it but tries to define the political system that allowed or encouraged such perversions of “normal” humanity. Instead of the faceless bureaucratic machine of the Third Reich he compares the Congo to seventeenth century Europe during the Thirty Years War in which marauding armies fought back and forth across what is now Germany leaving privation, disease and death in their wake.

“Dancing in the Glory of Monsters” is a brilliant combination of reporting, current history, political advocacy and ethnography. Jason Stearns has spent much of the past decade in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has met many of the key actors in Africa’s Great War and has seen the horror they have wreaked on the people and land in the Congo. A keen analyst of the politico-military affairs of the region—the DRC and the nine nations surrounding it, particularly Rwanda and Uganda—he looks at the political elites and militia commanders of the area (often the same people) to try and figure out why the war happened, if it “had” to happen and why the conflict has been so unrelenting and merciless.

He compares the situation in central Africa since 1996 to the Thirty Years War, a continent wide cataclysm of death, disease, destruction and collapse of society brought on the by the constant marching and countermarching of mercenary armies deployed from the nations that surround what is now Germany and finds a parallel between Adolph Eichmann, as described by Hannah Arendt, and Paul Rwarakabije, a general in the Rwandan Army whose forces operated in what was then Zaire as well as Rwanda. Eichmann was an important cog in a machine while Rwarakabije was a policy maker (to the extent anyone could be called that) but both were convinced of the inevitability of mass slaughter.

The Thirty Years War and the Holocaust are among the defining events of modern Europe. Both caused insupportable suffering; the Holocaust is the closest thing to absolute and incomparable evil that I can think of—those who might need a refresher on its horrors would want to consult “The Third Reich at War” by Richard Evans—it is an astonishing book but one I was too daunted by its sweep and detail to finish.

Stearns accomplishes the daunting challenge of making sense of what seems to be senseless activity, giving the reader a real (and horrifying) sense of what life was like for internal displaced persons, conscripted soldiers and refugees from Rwanda and Burundi. “Dancing in the Glory of Monsters” captures the everydayness, the granularity of life in the Congo during what must seem to be an endless war although he concentrates largely on the perpetrators of violence one of the real strengths of the book is Stearns’ refusal to make permanent categories of good or bad, oppressors or oppressed since many of his sources have been both during the past ten years. The best example of this might be Paul Rwarakabije, mentioned above; he fled from Rwanda with nothing, saved most of his family, and was stuck in a refugee camp, subject to the whims of his guards/captors. Later after political exoneration he led a unit of the Rwandan armed forces in the DRC. Another is the way the AFDL (Laurent Kabila’s improvised army) that was welcomed as liberators in the first Congo war even though they slaughtered Hutu refugees since they didn’t kill any Congolese. It is a cliché to say there are no simple answers in the Congo since there are no simple answers anywhere but Strearns illustrates the complexity of the situation while showing the human side of (almost) all the players....more

The People's Republic of China do a lot right in their dealing with the developing states of Africa. When investing in a country or granting aid the CThe People's Republic of China do a lot right in their dealing with the developing states of Africa. When investing in a country or granting aid the Chinese don't make political demands; they don't insist the recipient nation reform its economy to better pay bondholders; they stay for as long is necessary to get a project running and hand it over to the Africans, always ready to return if necessary. The Chinese build what African nations want--a railroad, a stadium, an office building for the Foreign Ministry--these are they types of "wasteful" projects that the International Monetary Fund and World Bank won't even consider. And commercial banks won't fund a project without the imprimatur of those transnational financial giants.

Technicians and executives from China work alongside their African counterparts. They live simply and frugally, often in barracks that they construct upon arrival. Managers and workers from the global North generally live in separate compounds, luxurious by African (or Chinese) standards and tend to supervise from afar--or at least as far as possible.

The Chinese are trusted because they aren't a former colonial power--indeed they can claim to be "post-colonial" themselves. They listen to what Africans want, even if those they are listening to are autocratic dictators. The Chinese drive hard bargains but do so in a businesslike fashion.

The future of Africa may well be in the East--the efforts of the United States and Western Europe have done little even after pouring billions of dollars in aid, debt cancellation and low interest loans into the same area. ...more

This little book has been a hit with economists who think that the only solution to grinding third world (African) poverty must be market-based. WhileThis little book has been a hit with economists who think that the only solution to grinding third world (African) poverty must be market-based. While it makes good points--particularly that humanitarian aid to Africa hasn't worked as a way to start economic development--those points get lost in Moyo's scattershot approach and lack of documentation. I am sure she has read everything available on the subject but there is no bibliography and only sketchy notes so she doesn't tell us where she got her ideas or even her facts. Her style is a real problem--she slides from analysis to polemic without transition so that it is sometimes difficult to tell whether she is asserting an opinion or citing evidence based findings.

Moyo seems smart as a whip with courage of her convictions and a fierce loyalty to her homeland, Zambia, and to sub-Saharan Africa generally. She is an energetic advocate but not a very convincing one. Her combination of African heritage and attacks on received wisdom (although she demolishes a few strawmen along the way) means that she has a good story, ready made for soundbites, helped along in our media obsessed Western culture by the fact that she is (based on author photos in the book and on the net) staggeringly attractive. If a more typical holder of her credentials--excellent degrees from Harvard and Oxford, positions at Goldman Sachs and the World Bank--had presented this book for publication he/she may well have been told to come back when it was actually a book and not an intermediate draft that needed more work. And a lot of copy editing--Moyo is not a particularly felicitous writer.

She doesn't spare the West in her list of what is wrong and how to fix it, going after the important issues like trade barriers, subsidies and immigration restrictions and is particularly hard on her fellow Africans pointing out that humanitarian aid makes control of a government valuable and so encourages armed rebellion, civil war and the horrors of mass population relocation. Succeeding in a rebellion and running the government means the winners have access to the many millions of dollars, Euros and pounds that continue to flow.

Recommended only as a quick primer for some of the main disputes in the foreign policy and humanitarian nexus. ...more

Devlin was a cold war apparatchik who ran the CIA station in what became Zaire. A product of his time and place, his main interest was keeping the USSDevlin was a cold war apparatchik who ran the CIA station in what became Zaire. A product of his time and place, his main interest was keeping the USSR out of the area and recruiting Congolese and foreign nationals to spy on the Soviets who were there.

Once again Michela Wrong's journalistic impressionism and meticulous reporting lights up a neglected corner of a neglected continent. Wrong is a writeOnce again Michela Wrong's journalistic impressionism and meticulous reporting lights up a neglected corner of a neglected continent. Wrong is a writer with incredible sources and she knows how to weld their information into a compelling story.

The book centers on John Githongo, an idealist in a world where pragmatism ruled. He was appointed as the head of a new anti-corruption agency created by Mwai Kibaki, newly elected president of Kenya. Kibaki was only the third Chief Executive of the east African country, replacing Daniel arap Moi who ruled from 1978 to 2002 and who replaced the revered Jomo Kenyatta, founding father, freedom fighter, hero of African independence.

Kenya, according to Wrong, is structured more by tribe than anything else. Membership in the Kikuyu tribe is more important than citizenship of Kenya, for example. President Kibaki and John Githongo were Kikuyus and Githongo discovered his role in the government was to act as window dressing for donors and foreign governments, to show these very important westerners that the corrupt old days of Moi were over. They weren't, of course. The people pocketing the bribes and kickbacks changed by the method didn't and the more Githongo found out the less popular he became.

Those now in power had the same view of government as those they replaced: it was not to produce publicgoods like roads, bridges, markets, irrigation, education, health care, public sanitation, clean drinking water or effective legal systems but to produce private goods for those who hold or have access to political power. Contracts don't go to the low bidder or to the company most able to perform but to whoever offers the largest bribe. The most outrageous example of this is the Anglo Leasing fiasco. Anglo was a company that existed only as an address in Liverpool--it had no plants, no equipment, produced nothing, had no contacts with those who did. It wasn't even a middleman but simply a facade so that when contracts let by the Kenyan government were paid to Kenyan officials the checks weren't made out to the individual politicians. When the government decided to update the printing and tracking of its passports Anglo was given the contact for a bid of 30 million Euros even though a French company with a long list of satisfied clients bid 6 million Euros. But it wasn't just the 500% increase in cost: Anglo Leasing had no capacity to produce passports and had no intention of doing so. They were also given contracts for a forensic lab, military vehicles even a frigate for the navy.

This is a tragic true story of one man's efforts--his obsessed and doomed striving--to vault Kenya from a well oiled kleptocracy that kept its citizens poor while the elites prospered into a functioning democracy....more

Collier recommends that failed states be invaded by multinational armed forces to rescue their citizens from further depredations by their leader or bCollier recommends that failed states be invaded by multinational armed forces to rescue their citizens from further depredations by their leader or by violent rebels. To be taken seriously such a course of action must be supported by well documented and cogent arguments, neither of which are presented here.

This book is a decent primer that describes but doesn't really explain why states fail and why it is so difficult to turn them around but is no more than that.

One hint regarding Collier's political outlook is on the back cover where the first blurb is from Niall Ferguson, who disfavors only those imperialist ventures that don't work the way they were planned. ...more

Conor Foley calls the roll of genocide, ethnic cleansing, rape as a political/military weapon, mass murder and other horrors of the past couple of decConor Foley calls the roll of genocide, ethnic cleansing, rape as a political/military weapon, mass murder and other horrors of the past couple of decades including a few natural as opposed to man made disasters. He has been at the aftermath of many of them: Somalia (civil and religious war); Kosovo (ethnic cleansing); Sri Lanka (civil war); Indonesia (tsunami); Sudan (ethnic cleansing, civil war); the Kurdish areas of Iraq and Turkey (state sponsored mass killing). Looming over everything is the slaughter of up to 800,000 Tsutis citizens of Rwanda by their Hutu neighbors while the United Nations ignored it or even tacitly encouraged it by pulling out troops. In retrospect it is clear that a couple of regiments of airborne infantry could have slowed and diverted much of the killing saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and a division could have stopped the massacre in its tracks.

The utter barbarity of Rwanda in 1994 is most used to justify "humanitarian intervention" which can range from military and political operations that infringe on the territory and sovereignty of a country on the hawkish end to the more dovish definition of impartial distribution of relief assistance during armed conflict. Foley's view is that most situations, dire though they may seem, are not as straightforward as Rwanda. He was in Kosovo during the height of the Serbian/Albanian battles and through the NATO led air strikes. Foley sees Kosovo as a telling example of "we must do something" which often leads creates more killing and destruction than would have happened without intervention.

The International Committee of the Red Cross gets high praise from Foley because they insist they won't take sides in any conflict but will work solely to alleviate the suffering caused by combat no matter who is firing the weapons. As other organizations have become more political, feeling they need to denounce human rights violations, such as Doctors Without Borders did in Sudan--which got them kicked out of the country--the Red Cross and Red Crescent organizations are able to continue their work by simply doing it.

One example is the work of the Red Cross in Guantanamo. While Red Cross personnel knew of human rights abuses, including torture, against prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghirab the were restricted to petitioning the U.S. government. In other words the ICRC wasn't able to go public--and never does. It gets in access to prisoners or to conflict zones because it is specifically and rigorously non-political and is often the only organization that is allowed such access. Its mission is strictly humanitarian, to ease the suffering of inmates and offer food, water and medical care to those caught in warfare and for whom it is a matter of life and death.

Foley doesn't have many answers--which is to his credit. He realizes that the specifics of humanitarian intervention will vary widely from crisis and be a constant source of debate. ...more

Equatorial Guinea may be the worst governed nation and with the most badly managed economy in the world--although terms like "govern" don't really appEquatorial Guinea may be the worst governed nation and with the most badly managed economy in the world--although terms like "govern" don't really apply to this tiny, newly oil-rich enclave on the coast of west Africa. The head of state, Teodoro Obiang, seized power from his uncle, Francisco Macías, who became head of state when the colonial power, Spain, left in 1968. Macias was credibly accused of genocide, cannibalism and total insanity--he spoke to God regularly and acted based on those discussions. Obiang is preferable only in comparison.

While Klitgaard's book is dated--he finished while the discover and exploitation of oil fields wasn't even being considered--it remains a valuable, entertaining and occasionally frustrating account of the collision of the first world with--well with whatever world if after the third.

Klitgaard worked in the planning ministry of EQ for over two years, his salary paid by the World Bank, in order to help them get up to western standards in a few minimal (and ultimately completely inconsequential) areas. The institutions that took it upon themselves to intervene into the economic and social collapse there were the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the United Nations. In each case their efforts worsened the problems they had come to help solve.

At the end of "Tropical Gangsters" Klitgaard wasn't optimistic about the future. Everything that has happened since then has shown his caution was well placed.

Impressionistic account of the last days of Portuguese rule in the last European colony in Africa. Kapuściński was in Luanda, the capital and traveledImpressionistic account of the last days of Portuguese rule in the last European colony in Africa. Kapuściński was in Luanda, the capital and traveled around territory controlled (often temporarily) by the MPLA, the liberation movement that was supported by the USSR and Cuba. As a Warsaw Pact journalist his accreditation if not his sympathies were to them. The MPLA was at war with UNITA in the north which was supported by Mobutu's Zaire--and therefor by the U.S. and France which funded Mobutu for decades. In south were the forces of the FNLA which an invasion of armored troops from South Africa helped to stiffen. There was at least one pitched battle between Cuban and South African regular troops.

Kapuściński has amazing descriptions in several set pieces. One on the rapid decay of Luanda as the Portuguese box up their homes, abandon their pets and head for the airport. The European quarter stays empty and deserted--everyone has left but the Angolans haven't moved in. Another is a terrifying ride to the south from Luanda into the sparsely populated desert to the MPLA outpost in Benguala. There was only one road between the two cities (according to Google Earth that is still the case) and the surrounding hinterlands were the domain of mobile FNLA troops who could set ambushes at any spot along the hundreds of miles of road.

In the last chapter includes telex messages between Kapuściński and his editor in Warsaw which describe the final defense of the capital interspersed with requests from Kapuscinski for money and cigarettes--cigarettes are coin of the realm in negotiating passage through checkpoints and from his editor asking if he wants a plane sent to him to get him out before the capital is overrun.

Kapuściński is an incredibly fluent writer and the translator here has done an excellent job. ...more

A short, well written and researched e-book that outlines some of the commercial and political initiatives of the People's Republic in the Congo. A goA short, well written and researched e-book that outlines some of the commercial and political initiatives of the People's Republic in the Congo. A good example, which Kushner takes pains to explain and which may be a herald of China's dealing with the rest of Africa is through Sicomines, a venture between the Congolese government and two Chinese mega-companies. The Chinese, in return for the rights to extract almost unimaginable amounts of copper, cobalt and other minerals over 25 years, will build three billion dollars worth of infrastructure--roads, hospitals and universities in Kinshasa and throughout the Congo. At current world prices the copper alone would be worth three times the current Congo GDP. ...more